At least five people are dead after a shooting Friday afternoon at an airport in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and a suspect is in custody, according to the Broward County Sheriff's Office.

The sheriff's office said on Twitter that shots were fired at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport at around 12:55 p.m. local time. Eight people have been hospitalized so far, and the upper level of the airport has been reopened after all services were suspended.

News footage from the scene showed people on the tarmac outside the airport.

This is an ongoing story. For updates, continue reading on VICE News.

A blink-and-you-missed-it controversy played out last month over the A&E series Generation KKK. The show was announced on December 19 and immediately faced criticism about its perceived normalization of the white power movement. Actor Wendell Pierce was calling for a boycott, while Ellen Pompeo got drawn into a Twitter spat sparked by her use of black emojis.

Four days later, the show's title was changed to Escaping the KKK: A Documentary Series Exposing Hate in America, and a civil rights organization was announced as an addition to A&E's partners. (Full disclosure: VICELAND is a joint venture between A&E Networks and VICE Media.) Then, just one day later, the show was canceled. According to an A&E statement, the network had learned the day before that producers had paid some interviewees for access, which violated A&E's ethical guidelines.

One good thing that might emerge from this is slightly increased attention to the KKK documentaries soon to air on PBS.

Birth of a Movement, premiering February 6, explores the notorious KKK-glorifying The Birth of a Nation—"a film whose legacy has prolonged the racial distrust and horrific problems associated with slavery," in the words of Birth of a Movement's co-director/producer Bestor Cram.

The focus of Movement is on a lesser-known figure in US civil rights: William Monroe Trotter. Angered by the 1915 epic Nation, which depicted black men as violent rapists who deserved to be suppressed by heroic Klansmen, Trotter tried to get screenings stopped in his hometown of Boston. His efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, and instead led to more tickets sold to curious white viewers. But Trotter's and the NAACP's organizing around the film created an important template for the future. And the film's legacy persisted, infuriating a young Spike Lee when it was presented at NYU's film school without any historical context.

Nation, meanwhile, became a recruiting tool for the KKK—an organization that had been fading into obscurity before the movie came along. Movement shows the lack of easy answers when it comes to freedom of speech. Yes, the right to expression is important, but when is this trumped by the right to life? Nation endangered black people's lives, point-blank. In the current political climate, it can be argued that racially inflammatory language is itself making some groups less safe, even if the connection is less direct than with Nation.

A Boston NAACP pamphlet protesting 'The Birth of a Nation.' Credit: 'Birth of a Movement,' Northern Light Productions, 2016

Birth of a Movement will be followed on February 13 by Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race & America (which also opens in New York City today). Accidental Courtesy follows pianist Daryl Davis around the country as he gives talks, visits racially significant sites, and catches up with buddies—who happen to be current or former Klansmen. These people are varying degrees of delusional, like the National Socialist Movement commander who compares himself to MLK Jr. Davis talks about having turned men like these—who say they don't hate him personally—into first friends, then doubters of the white power ideology.

Producer/director Matt Ornstein told me that the filmmaking team was cautious about keeping a careful balance between not giving extremists too much airtime and showing the continued relevance of their ideas. Thus, key intended audiences included groups that were less familiar with the Klan, like people outside of the US and young people within the US, who—before recent political events, at least—would have seen white supremacy as a historical relic.

Responsibility around humanizing Klansmen rested heavily with the filmmakers. "We treated it like a lab loaded with plutonium," Ornstein said. But ultimately it was necessary to present the KKK interviewees as three-dimensional people, not just out of a documentarian's duty, but also to show the capacity for change. Ornstein argued, "We have this concept of people that are racist or full of hate or join ISIS; it's like they have stage three cancer, and they're gone forever. And that's not true. They are people, and they can change their lives, and as long as we don't view them as human, as long as we write them off completely, we're not really giving them many options."

Davis actually sees the current political climate as an opportunity. As he explained to me, his KKK-related work has led him to the conclusion that "back" in the motto "Take our country back"—like "again" in "Make American great again"—is a code word akin to a KKK slogan. Any suggestion otherwise is "a crock of bullspit." But after nearly 30 years of getting up close and personal with white supremacists, who in his experience all voted for Trump, "I feel that Donald Trump is the best thing that has happened to the country. Now he's brought out all these people. I know where they are, I've always known where they are. But the general populace did not know where they are."

The friendships shown in Accidental Courtesy are a bit cozy, and the film's best scene is also its most combative one. Davis explained, "It almost got into a fistfight or something." Davis sits down to drinks with a couple of young Black Lives Matter activists, who are at first confused about his "hobby," then ultimately pissed-off about what they call his "fetish." They consider him a sellout for wasting energy on individual bigots, rather than working within the black community. When Davis returns after this confrontation to his garage museum, with its carefully tended collection of KKK memorabilia from Klansmen he's converted, his expression is heavy.

Davis's kill-'em-with-kindness type of activism isn't the same as theirs, he acknowledged. "If you want to tear down the system [of white supremacy], then go after the people who created it. When you change their lives, they change the system. So that's the way I do it. I go after the individuals… I take the direct approach of sitting down and talking with the racists."

Daryl Davis with activists Tariq Touré (left) and Kwame Rose (right) in Baltimore. Credit: Sam Gezari

One question is whether anyone will watch these two films. Ornstein acknowledged, "The group that watches social justice–related documentaries is already somewhat self-selecting." At the same time, "I would love for more people who disagree with the film completely to see it."

The PBS audience tends to be well-off and liberal, while A&E's reality programming has made stars out of parking cops, storage locker buyers, and Duck Dynasty (which the New York Times considers the strongest example of a geographically skewed TV show).

So the messiness around Escaping the KKK seems like a wasted opportunity. No matter how well-made its films might be, PBS is preaching to the choir. A balanced documentary series about the KKK that asks tough questions about political legitimacy and race relations, on a network that isn't seen as elite, could be useful right about now. And Birth of a Movement's Cram is one documentarian who would have supported this idea.

But Escaping the KKK probably wasn't that series. Allegations that participants were paid hefty sums and told how to behave suggest that the show was more reality TV than "docuseries," the label it had been striving for. Cram pointed out that it should never have been presented as a documentary.

If this shitstorm shows anything, it's that holding production teams to account is a good thing, but that this has to go in multiple directions. It's not enough to ask if hate is being normalized (or ratcheted up for ratings). We also need to ask how, if the aim of a film is to change minds, it can reach those minds in the first place. In Davis's words, "The problem today is people talk about each other or they talk at each other… Let's talk with each other."

When it was released in 1999, Fight Club was seen by many critics as a damning statement about consumerist culture, the de-humanizing roles forced on men by American capitalism, and the excesses of masculinity. In fact, Empire described the movie adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel as possessing "a great deal of sick humor at the expense of masculinist ideals and white-collar society." Its director, David Fincher, was largely lauded for having captured the zeitgeist.

But the legacy of Fight Club may end up being quite different. In the decade and a half or so after its release and reception as a cult classic, Fight Club has been embraced by the loose collection of radical online male communities (known as the "manosphere") as a kind of gospel text.

Members of these groups, who congregate around sites like Return of Kings, Masculine Empire, and The Red Pill subreddit, attribute the ills of Western society to the decline of traditional gender roles. All of them—pick-up artists and men's rights activists alike—share a deeply ingrained hostility towards women, and more importantly, feminism. Think articles titled "Five reasons you should date a girl with an eating disorder."

Read the rest of this piece on Broadly

On Friday, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, and John Brennan, the head of the CIA, presented President-elect Donald Trump with a full US intelligence report regarding Russia's involvement in the 2016 election cyberattacks. After reviewing what some US officials have claimed to be conclusive evidence that Russia was not only behind the hacks but gave damaging information on Hillary Clinton to WikiLeaks via a third party, the president-elect remained firm on his stance that the hacks did not influence the election in his favor.

In a statement released from his transition team Friday afternoon, Trump said, "While Russia, China, other countries, outside groups, and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses, and organizations including the Democrat National Committee, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines."

Earlier this week, multiple US intelligence officials told the Washington Post that there were a "variety of different exhibits" in the report that suggest Russia was trying to skew the election toward Trump, including intercepted communications from top Russian officials who were celebrating their involvement in his win.

"The Russians felt pretty good about what happened on Nov. 8 and they also felt pretty good about what they did," a senior US official told the Post.

On Thursday, Clapper addressed a Senate hearing echoing these sentiments about the intelligence report, saying, "I don't think we've ever encountered a more aggressive or direct campaign to interfere in our election process than we've seen in this case."

Although Trump told the New York Times that he felt the investigation was a "political witch hunt," he ultimately called the report "constructive" in his statement and vowed to create a plan that would help protect America from future cyberwarfare.

"The methods, tools, and tactics we use to keep America safe should not be a public discussion that will benefit those who seek to do us harm," Trump said. "Two weeks from today I will take the oath of office and America's safety and security will be my number one priority."

Shortly after Trump's statement, the US intelligence community released its findings to the public, so feel free to take a look and decide for yourself.

I first dreamed up the "beer suicide"—a glass of all the draft beers at a bar mixed together—last fall, in an attempt to piss off a beer snob friend of mine. We were out at a bar, and he wouldn't stop moaning about the shittiness of East Coast breweries and his need for an "Oregon craft beer."

I told him that if he longed for a more complex flavor profile or whatever, he should just get the bartender to mix a few draft beers together, like we used to do with fountain sodas when we were kids. He puckered, insulted that I would even suggest such a thing, so I called the bartender over and asked if she'd fix me a pint of all the drinks on tap mixed together.

"It's going to curdle or something," my friend said, revolted, as if dumping an IPA into a hefeweizen would create some kind of strange, toxic sludge. The bartender took his side, rolling her eyes before pouring me another Narragansett. I drank it and let the subject drop, but the idea ignited a desire inside of me that no normal beer could soothe. I realized that the young kid who once carefully layered different Slurpee flavors into a cup was still alive deep down—his tastes had just matured.

Beer mixing isn't a completely taboo concept. Drinking a pair of beers blended together is a pretty normal thing, at least in the UK, where their beer palates are a little more open to experimentation than us Yanks. The Black and Tan is the most common beer blend—it's a light beer, normally a pale ale, mixed with a stout, and people have been sucking them down since the 1800s. There's also a Snake Bite, which is a half lager, half cider mix; and the Black Velvet, another beer blend from the brains of the Brits that combines champagne and stout.

All those drinks are fine and good and whatever, but I didn't want "fine" or "good." A normal beer is full of subtle notes of this and flowery hints of that. Fuck notes; I wanted a drink that tasted like all 88 piano keys played at once. Fuck hints; I wanted to be steamrolled by flavor. What kind of terrible, twisted tastes awaited me at the bottom of a beer suicide? What new realms of intoxication might I reach? I had to know.

Unfortunately, almost every bartender I asked refused to pour me one, thanks to some weird bartender principle/utter lack of adventure. But I continued to order them everywhere I went. After a few more months of failed attempts, and a few more bar patrons thinking I was either an asshole trying to troll (partly), or an asshole with terrible taste (definitely), I found three spots that would let me taste test their beer suicides. The moment that my mind and body had been waiting so long for had finally arrived.

Here's how it all went down.

Bar: Iona
Number of Taps: 23
Notable Flavors: Dogfish Head Breakfast Stout, Aspall Dry English Cider, Guinness

Megan Hopkins, the bartender at Iona, was a little apprehensive when whipping me up a suicide. Luckily she wasn't completely averse to the idea, since she's used to selling a Snake Bite or a Black and Tan to customers from time to time.

She gave me a couple of these two beer mixes to start. They tasted fine and looked pretty (the dark beer floated on top of the light like a booze ombré), but they only whet my appetite for my one true desire: a thick hoppy stew of all the beers at once.

When Megan finally poured it, she quickly realized that she was going to need a bigger glass, so we pulled out a ladder from the back room, and I climbed to a high shelf behind the bar to grab a giant, dusty novelty glass that you could easily drown a small child inside. It looked glorious when it was finally full.

The taste, unfortunately, wasn't that intense or disgusting or otherwise mind-blowing. The multiple IPAs Iona has on tap dominated the flavor profile, and it seemed like something that my snobby-ass beer friend could sip on while talking about floral hops.

It was fine. But was that it? Had I come this far to taste a beer suicide just to find out that it was, you know, pretty fine? I needed to try another.

Bar: Chilo's
Number of Taps: Six
Notable Flavors: Pacifico, Modelo, Founders Porter

Chilo's is a great bar with an even better taco truck in the back. The guy tending bar is an old pal, so he was ready and willing to whip me up a beer suicide for the sake of science. He even garnished it with a lime, which felt in keeping with the Modelo and Pacifico on draft. I twisted the wedge, dropped it in, and took a swig.

The draft porter mostly dominated the flavor, and the whole thing tasted like thick, citrus sludge. It was grosser than Iona's, but still mostly palatable, aside from the notes of lime. I drank about half of it and moved on.

Still, I wanted my tastebuds to be brutalized with beer flavor in order to feel that I had achieved a truly transcendent beer suicide experience. I knew just the place where I could get it.

Bar: The Well
Number of Taps: 54
Notable Flavors: Basically every beer imaginable

The Well has more beers on draft than any place I've ever seen. The bar's intrepid manager, Ian Ljungquist, didn't need any convincing to pour me a suicide—he leapt at the opportunity, excited, like we were some kind of kindred beer brothers. He had already experimented with beer blends, and not just the basic Black and Tans.

"The most I've ever blended is three," he said. "Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. A mixture can bring out strange flavors in one beer you might not have known were there. Sometimes it accentuates interesting flavors or creates a really nice harmony that you wouldn't have expected. Sometimes two great beers can be really terrible together."

But what about 54 beers?

Ian poured the beer suicide into the largest container he could find: a big plastic tub. As he went, the liquid grew darker and darker, until the whole thing was pitch black. He swirled the tub around to make sure the mix was even, and then grabbed me a glass.

I sipped, then sipped again. I could feel my pupils dilate. It was everything I had hoped for and more. My mouth was overrun with flavors—flavors of all kinds, contrasting and complimenting and dancing around. It was like I was hearing a thousand conversations and understanding them all simultaneously.

Ian poured himself a glass, and we drank together like two beer adventurers trekking deep into the unknown. I knew him, then, and he knew me; something close and intimate passed between us, something neither of us could fully articulate.

"It's not bad," he finally said, after a time. "It's just weird. Sometimes it's good to taste weird, though, right? Not everything you drink or eat has to be delicious. Isn't it fun to try things that are compelling strictly because they're weird?"

He poured the remains of the concoction into a growler for me, and we said our goodbyes. I walked home in silent revelry, bottle of beer suicide in hand. Then I walked inside my apartment and immediately dropped the jug on my kitchen floor. As I cleaned the 54-beer mess up, I dreamed of my next beer suicide, of the weird tastes and textures it might hold. I'll never order a normal drink again.

If you see River around New York City, buy him a beer suicide, so he can continue this important research. Also, follow him on Twitter.

It was yesterday morning, scrolling through Metro dot com, when it happened. A story about a comment that Chris Cooke, a man from Salford, had left on Tesco's Facebook page. Directed at the supermarket's management, the post shows a slightly out-of-focus photo of two girls dressed in pyjamas, shopping in Tesco Salford. Harmless, right? WRONG, according to Cooke. In fact, he describes their actions as "bloody disgusting", calling for people dressed like this to "not be served in stores".

Tesco, somewhat surprisingly, didn't swat Cooke down in their response. Instead, they lodged the complaint officially, suggesting he's one of "many customers" who have made the same kind of comment. This confused me. Surely Cooke can't be representative of the majority? Like exit polls or social media, are differing views over pyjama-wearing in public yet another indicator of how detached we are from one another nowadays?

To find out, I decided to get out of bed, unwashed and unchanged, and brave Birmingham's great outdoors. I would enter supermarkets for five minutes a time, dressed in my own pyjamas and dressing gown, going about my own business, to see whose doors are open to the people, and whose have been lost to the aristocracy.

TESCO

All photos: Tim Mobbs

There's only one place for this quest to begin, and that's at the beginning. The heart of the debate: Tesco.

With five minutes on the clock, I'm ready to go. I pace through the doorway and feel eyes upon me. The words of Chris Cooke echo in my mind – "bloody"... "disgusting". There's no way I'm going to last longer than a few minutes in here.

As I stare sheepishly at an El Paso Fajita Seasoning Kit, a man makes a beeline for me. My back tenses, my muscles seize, then – as his mouth opens – he utters, "Excuse me," and passes me by. All of a sudden the mood lifts and I realise: the people of Tesco don't have a problem. No – it must be the bourgeoise upstairs: management (something seemingly confirmed when I open my phone to find the news that Tesco has now given its managers permission to eject any customers wearing pyjamas). So I burst through the red tape and put the question to them.

"Do you have any problem with me being dressed like this?"

They take a look.

"So long as you've not got anything popping out and you're covered up, mate, there's no problem." He smiles. "It's not uncommon to get pyjamas in here."

"Oh. And you've had no complaints about them?"

"Not that I know of, no."

Well, who'd have thought it – Tesco: supermarket of the people.

SAINSBURY'S

Tesco is a battleground won, but now it's time to climb a rung up the ladder. With five minutes back on the clock, I'm heading to Sainsbury's.

Sat down, waiting for coffee and watching the minutes fall away, you'd have thought I'd feel heartened, but I don't. I search for fellow defiant, comfortable shoppers in pyjamas. I don't see any. Could it be that the pyjama-wearers of 2017 have already conceded? Perturbed, I decide to judge an honest human reaction.

"Sir," I say, stopping a man and staring intensely into his eyes. "How does this make you feel?" The man's eyes dance down my arms, toward my fingertips, which are pointing at a phone screen.

He stops scanning pomegranate juice for a second, squints and looks back to me.

"This is you, isn't it?" I nod. "Well, I don't know how it makes me feel," he continues. "It's fine."

"No problem with this at all?" I ask.

"No." He frowns and gets back to work.

Another one down, baby. People: 2, Persecutors: 0.

MARKS & SPENCER

If there's anything to be learned from 2016, it's that your nan's opinion definitely still matters. Consider this: Bradley Walsh, presenter of ITV's The Chase, released a swing record, and it was named the best-selling debut British artist of the year. One older person was my late grandmother, who I'm sure would absolutely loathe everything about me in this moment: she wouldn't let you leave the house without polishing your shoes, let alone in your pyjamas. The one place I can imagine her haunting is her beloved Marks & Spencer, so it's here I head to next.

The difference between Tesco and Sainsbury's isn't that pronounced; Sainsbury's is just, you know, a bit nicer. It's got marginally better packaging. But the leap to M&S is a big one. This is a chain that sells Madagascan tiger prawns in its motorway service station outlets. So surely they'll have more exacting standards for their customers than my last two spots?

But no: despite one or two double takes, and a helpful store clerk admitting she "wishes she could get away with that", it's more of the same really. Waiting for the toilet, however, I notice Ailene, a lady who seems uncomfortable. So I put it to her.

"I don't think you should be doing that, sorry." She gestures toward my robe. "They're for sleeping. You haven't had a wash, got out of bed, or anything else."

"Would you file a complaint about somebody dressing like this?"

"No, but I will say this: have a shower and get dressed. You'll feel much better for it."

That's it, isn't it: the ceiling. M&S: a place where men like Cooke can shop in peace, never to be bothered by "bloody disgusting" people buying milk, clothed in what still look very much like clothes, but are in fact offensive.

I feel a tap on the shoulder. "I don't agree with that."

Maurice cuts into our conversation in his thick Brummie accent. "You see people all the time like this, and it doesn't bother me. I'm alright with it. One thing that does cross my mind is, have you come out and not realised?" he laughs. "As I've come out the house with slippers on. But it's fine: you look comfortable."

With the buzzer going, my time in M&S is up. And the debate between Maurice and Ailene continues. They're like Constanza and Seinfeld, caught in that sweatpants argument from all those years ago: Ailene, supporting Jerry's suggestion that it's a symbol of giving up; Maurice, with his Constanza-ian inability to let highly unimportant issues go.

This must be a microcosm of the battle engulfing our country at large.

SELFRIDGES

I've had it with guarded British supermarkets – I need a hostile, prickly and snootier place than ever. So, next, I tread the marble floors and designer aisles of Selfridges.

Taking soft steps through columns of shit I'll never be able to afford, I notice something: I'm repelling everyone I pass, like a shark swimming through colossal schools of fish. No customers want to be side-by-side with a man in pyjamas, and no clerks want to bother a man in a dressing gown.

So this is the key to supermarket peace? All along, this is all we needed to shop like this? Praise the Lord – let's celebrate!

I ask a lady at the Bollinger champagne bar for a sample, and she obliges me with a champagne chocolate, no follow-up. I don't know if it's that champagne chocolate going to my head, but I feel unstoppable. There's one last target for me: a chance to play things out at Birmingham's crème de la crème.

HARVEY NICHOLS, THE MAILBOX

The Mailbox: an expansive ghost town for the affluent – pretty much the most expensive place in the UK's not-so-affluent second city. Adorned with modern art and punctuated by black-tie restaurants, security here won't let stag-dos or hens in: so surely I'm out of the question?

I make my way over toward management to see what they have to say.

"I thought you may be troubled or perhaps ill," says the man. "But I have no issue with the way you're dressed."

"This isn't something that The Mailbox would have an issue with?"

"It isn't."

So there you have it: Cooke was wrong. No reasonable people really give a shit about anyone wearing pyjamas in public. We live in an accepting and progressive society. One ready for change. So I implore you: take to the streets in dressing gowns; this is the uniform of the future. I've got good feeling about 2017. A very good feeling.

@Oobahs

Sometime after sunrise on the first day of the new year, Brian Eno sent some light into the darkness. Reflection—the experimental pioneer's latest full-length—had been out in the world for a few hours, so he took to his Facebook page to offer some words of inspiration to accompany it. Over the course of a few paragraphs, he looked back on what he aptly described as "a pretty rough year," suggesting that 2016's closure might have marked the end of a long period of societal decline, rather than its beginning.

But even as "knee-jerk nationalism" dominated global political discourse, he argues, there was an awakening of another sort, an undercurrent of thinkers weighing the nature of democracy—and figuring out how we can make it work anew. The vague solutions that Eno proposes—"thoughtful and creative social and political action"—involve, not spontaneous action, but careful contemplation and meaningful collaboration. Put another way, you might say that the way forward begins with Reflection.

Eno's newest ambient work can be purchased as a 54-minute CD, LP, and digital download, or streamed on cloud-based service of your choice. The version ported to these formats is about what you'd expect: a collection of synthesized tones that sound as pristine and warm as freshly fired ceramics. It's the sort of comfortably escapist album that Eno has been making since he first coined and popularized the term "ambient music" in the mid 1970s—or maybe even before. As he mentions in the press release for Reflection, one of his first-ever recordings was a slowed-down drone, sourced from the striking of a metal lampshade.

Read more on Thump

It's 2017, and legal weed is on the way—close enough that you might even have your first non-criminal session planned out. If you're corny enough to imagine making history by sparking a joint on the steps of Parliament minutes after the paperwork is signed, it's worth remembering you won't be the first legal weed smoker in Canada.

Medical weed, and the right to grow it, has now been on the table for two decades, starting with an epileptic guy named Terrence Parker. After being charged with possession a bunch of times, Parker fought the government and won the right to be exempt from further growing and holding charges in 1997. An appeal court decided that exemption should apply to anyone growing for a medical purpose in 2000. Though regulations tried to outlaw homegrown medicinal bud again in 2013, that was struck down in court last year.

What we haven't had in Canada (yet) is a legally-sanctioned medical shroom grower. With a wave of recent studies suggesting psychedelics are an effective treatment for depression, end-of-life anxiety, addiction and more, that prospect doesn't seem as far fetched at it once did. As you can probably imagine, some fans are already looking at Canada's that path to medical weed, and applying the same arguments to magic mushrooms. Will that take another 20 years to grow your own? Or is the legal precedent already set?

Twenty-three-year-old Spencer Allison is on precisely this trip. He's read much of the new research on psychedelic treatment for depression, as well as a few court decisions, and thinks it's just a matter of time before he can grow his own medical mushies. Allison's been bugging a bunch of bureaucrats at Health Canada for a new "section 56" exemption, just like Parker's in '97. So far, it's not going so well.

Allison says he found the Parker case on Wikipedia, and went to the Ontario Court of Appeals site to get a summary of the arguments. "I went through that, hit Ctrl-F, and just started changing every mention of epilepsy to depression, and found anything that applied to marijuana also worked for LSD and other psychedelics."

Read More: What Are the Medical Benefits of Psychedelics?

Allison thinks the very same argument will eventually force the government to let him legally grow at home. "I think it's just a matter of when, more or less." Given all the excitement (and caution) over psilocybin's medicinal possibilities, I decided to call a few science and legal experts to find out if Allison's optimism holds up to scrutiny.

When I called up Mark Haden of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, aka MAPS, he said weed and mushrooms are entirely different drugs, and their legalization will probably be super different, too. Haden recently put out a paper that laid out how he thinks psychedelics should be regulated in Canada, including a new agency of government-licensed trip sitters.

"The path to legalization of cannabis is completely different. The path to legalization of cannabis has been political," he told VICE. According to Haden, because psychedelics don't have the same widespread popularity that weed does, we'll never see mushrooms on a ballot question in the states, or the right to micro-dose rolled into a major policy plank in Canada's next election.

But that doesn't necessarily mean legal shrooms is a long way off, says Haden. Because medicinal tripping is so niche, he says it is more likely to be handled like any other new treatment seeking government approval. "Basically it's called drug discovery, and any pharmaceutical company who has ever produced a prescription drug is going through the stages we're going through," he told VICE.

MAPS is actually in a third stage of clinical trials for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy treatment for victims of trauma, something Haden says is on track to become a prescription by 2021. A second study into the effects of psychedelic mushrooms on depression is at about the same stage, with clinical trials showing promise.

"My understanding is they're on the same timeline that we're on," Haden told VICE. "When we finish our phase three study, we submit our data to Health Canada… and they look at it and say 'we approve.'"

If all goes well, Haden expects there will be separate certification for growing at home. Patients who get approval from their doctor would perhaps do a weekend training course, to get a basic understanding of setting, safety and dosage. But before we get there—he's guessing a four to five year timeline—Haden anticipates there'll be some resistance. For one, psychedelic treatment for depression would hurt the bottom line of any company in the anti-depressants market. But what pharmaceutical companies will do to protect those profits is still "up to speculation," according to Haden.

Just like with weed, a court challenge could force a decision on the issue. John Conroy was part of the legal team that helped strike down Canadian regulations that banned personal weed growing for medical purposes, and he sees some parallels to the case for psilocybin.

The fact that psychedelic mushrooms grow in the wild makes for a similarly interesting case, according to Conroy. He recalls a decade-old controversy over what to do when mushrooms showed up in farmer's fields. "I remember going to a meeting many years ago, when it was popular, and hearing people say 'So what am I supposed to do if the stuff grows wild in my fields? Do I have to smack 'em over the head?'"

But Conway says despite the legal parallels, he hasn't heard much interest in getting a challenge like that going. "To the best of my knowledge it would be similar to marijuana. You would need a doctor that's supportive," Conroy said, adding that there would probably need to be criminal charges brought against the mushroom grower.  "Going into court, you could bring an Allard-type case forward."

When asked about obstacles, Conway said getting doctors on board to prescribe could be the hardest part. Most of them aren't into "whole plant" medicine, he said, and medical colleges have pushed back against marijuana policy reform.

But with weed setting the stage this year, both Haden and Conroy seemed to think mushrooms could follow a speedier path to home cultivation. Drawing comparison to other civil rights shifts, Haden sees an extended period of debate and protest leading up to several rapid changes in drug policy.

"When the balloon pops, it pops pretty darn quickly," he said. 'Cannabis was the first leaking of air out of the balloon."

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

The election of Donald Trump to go along with a Republican-controlled Congress means that all of a sudden, the long-held conservative dream of repealing the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, is about to come true. But what happens after that repeal is far from clear. Though Republicans and right-wing think tanks have some ideas about what they would replace Obamacare with, GOP officials haven't hammered out specifics yet. Their current strategy seems to be to repeal Obamacare, but delay putting the repeal into effect in order to give themselves time to craft an alternative.

They have to tread carefully, because simply erasing the ACA would not only leave an estimated 20 million people without health insurance, but potentially cost the country 3 million jobs by 2021, according to a recent study by the Commonwealth Fund. It's also a move that 75 percent of Americans disprove of—even some Trump supporters don't want to see Obamacare end.

But just as some Republican-controlled states have fought Obamacare tooth and nail for years—refusing the Medicaid expansion it offered, and taking the federal government to court—liberal states may make moves toprotect their local economies and residents should the ACA be repealed. To find out how that battle might be conducted, I spoke with Jill Horwitz, a health policy expert and law professor at UCLA. Horwitz shed some light on why there have been so many challenges with Obamacare, and what state legislatures can legally do should Congress pull the plug on federal funding.

VICE: Let's start with the basics: What is the Affordable Care Act doing well and how does it fall short?
Jill Horwitz: The pros of the ACA are that it covered many millions of people who didn't have insurance and it made it reasonably affordable to many of them. It stopped the ability of insurers to drop you in your time of biggest healthcare need, and it seemed to be going some way to controlling costs.

The downside is that it didn't reach everybody that it was meant to reach. Many of the plans on the state exchanges [created by the ACA] were still very expensive for some families, so they couldn't afford to get their insurance on those exchanges. And it hadn't done all the work that it needed to do for changing the way that medical care was delivered in the country. But it was on the way to doing that—I think we saw all kinds of signs that it was working and that it needed reform, not elimination.

So what will happen if it gets repealed?
If a repeal goes through it could mean over 20 million people are going to lose their health insurance. Not only that, those of us who get their health insurance from our employers are going to find that insurance companies reinstitute annual caps on spending just at the very point where we most need help. There's going to be enormous dislocation in the medical industry, because patients need to be insured for hospitals to survive—and health care is 17 percent of the GDP. You play with it this irresponsibly there are going to be bad effects.

When Obamacare was passed, states were given the ability to expand Medicare if they wanted, as well as set up their own state-specific marketplace where people could purchase health insurance. Why was it important to allow states to do that?
There were legal reasons, but I think it was more of a political calculation. In our contemporary political order, federal plans are "bad" and state plans are "good," so this was a way to let states do what states wanted to do under some constraints and with the federal government footing a lot of the bill.

What would happen to the states that elected to expand Medicaid if Obamacare were repealed?
First of all, Congress can't fully repeal Obamacare tomorrow, but they can pull the plug on a lot of the funding for it. What does that mean? That states couldn't afford to pay the bills on Medicaid. If [Congress] follows through with this with no replacement, then all those expansions, all those people who were able to get health insurance because of the Affordable Care Act and the expansions through Medicaid, won't be able to get it anymore. They will not have health insurance.

Considering that states like California might see some significant economic losses should Obamacare be repealed, what can states do to push back? Can they delay any changes with lawsuits?
Yes, you bet there are going to be a lot of lawsuits. One thing that is very clear is that even states that are as big and economically powerful as California cannot keep Medicaid and the exchanges running the way they are today without the federal subsidies. It's just too much money.

First we have to know exactly what [Congress is] going to do—it's very hard to plan a lawsuit when you don't know what you'll be challenging. There's been little detail. We hear things for example about the federal government giving block grants to states to have high-risk pools—things we've seen not work before. If they do that, the states may well sue and say, "Well, you had an obligation, we relied on you when we set this whole thing up, and this is a bit of a bait-and-switch."

When he was campaigning, President-elect Trump said that he would make sure that everyone was covered, but no one knows how he plans to do that. One of the things he's said is that we're going to let insurers compete across state lines, but there are places where insurers are allowed to compete across state lines and there are no cost savings there. And even if on the most generous estimates of how much there would be in cost savings, you're many orders of magnitude away from getting the savings that would be required to cover the uninsured in America.

Do you think states could try to create their own "universal" statewide health insurance plans, like Colorado tried to do recently?
You know they might try to do it but again, the power to tax is at the federal level for the most part, not at the state. So you need resources redistributed from the feds to the states. California state income taxes and New York City income taxes are already pretty high, right? So raising state income taxes doesn't seem like a viable solution. It's really hard to see what good is going to come out of this.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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A massive iceberg the size of Delaware is likely to crack off of an ice shelf in West Antarctica sometime soon, British scientists have confirmed.

This would destabilize the ice shelf, known as the Larsen C, and put it in a precarious position. Ice shelves act like floating buttresses to the mainland glaciers, so If the giant Larsen C were to collapse into the sea, glaciers from West Antarctica would end up sliding into the ocean, and ultimately raising sea levels—possibly by many feet.

Scientists from the MIDAS Project, an academic group that studies ice melt and its impact on shelf stability in Antarctica, have been following the progression of a giant crack in the Larsen C for the last two years. Scientists have been keeping a close watch because of past calving events and shelf collapses that have occurred in the same region.

The project team has said that the rift, as they're calling the huge crack, is a geographical event, and not one directly attributable to climate change, but it could hasten climate change-related effects when it breaks away, by weakening the Larsen C ice shelf as a whole.

If the Larsen C collapsed, it would cause glaciers from land to spill into the sea—which would in turn raise sea levels and perhaps contribute to increased Antarctic glacial melting.

This past December, satellite observations revealed that the rift grew 18km in just a matter of weeks. "After a few months of steady, incremental advance since the last event, the rift grew suddenly by a further 18km during the second half of December 2016. Only a final 20km of ice now connects an iceberg one quarter the size of Wales to its parent ice shelf," said the MIDAS Project on its website.

Read more on Motherboard.

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Earlier this week, the new members of Congress were sworn in by their dungeon master, Paul Ryan. That means we have 27 fresh-faced Republicans in office who are ready to lavishly enjoy their party's control of all three branches of government and ruin our lives.

Meet the right-wing's freshman class:

Photo via Wikipedia

It's Friday morning, which means in about 12 hours, someone, somewhere, is going to be a dickhead in a kebab shop. It's a fact of British nightlife: you go out, you get drunk, you decide a kebab might absorb some of the alcohol otherwise headed for your headache, you go to a kebab shop, you witness a furious man shout about garlic sauce, you go home.

With that in mind, I asked the kebabbies of Shoreditch about the worst dickheads they've ever had to endure.

Muhammed, Damascu Bite

VICE: Hi. Who's the worst dickhead you've ever encountered in here?
Muhammed: It's OK down here, as I work during the day, but I got a lot of dickheads in Camden working the night shift. People would find everything wrong with us. They spat in our faces. They wouldn't pay. It was normal because they were drunk.

What would you do about it?
It depends on how I felt. Sometimes I'd fight with them, but usually not. We had to call the police on people.

Do you think it's like this in every shop?
No, we ended up getting security. It's like this in shops without security.

Osman, City Best Kebab

Are any of your customers dickheads?
Osman: My customers are always nice. If they're upset, I'm upset, and I'll take them downstairs and look after them.

Even when they're drunk?
Yes.

How long have you worked here?
I've owned this place for ten years.

And what makes it special?
We serve special food and we're always clean. People come in here after going to other places in Shoreditch and they always think it's the best.

Mus, Pera Restaurant

Can you tell me about your worst customers?
Mus: The other day a customer came in and ordered food, and then he said he didn't want it. So we made him a new order and he cancelled that too, because he said he didn't want a filling in it. I told him that we wouldn't make a third order and he got angry. He said, "I'm going to ruin you," and was shouting at me and threw his food over the counter. Other customers got involved and then he hit one of them. He caused such a big row – chairs and tables were flying everywhere. You always get drunk idiots late at night.

That sounds shit. How late are you guys open until?
We open late on Friday and Saturday. It happens quite often that there will be a fight.

Do you own this place? It smells really good in here.
Yes, and if you read all the reviews they're good. This guy who was threatening me left me a bad one. Most of my customers are good. Another guy threw food at me and a full bottle of coke that just missed my head, and my customers threw him out.

Did you have to call the police?
No, the police are never involved when I have an argument. Apart from one time where two customers were fighting. I just think this wouldn't happen in an Italian or a French restaurant. People don't respect us.

John, Turkish Delight

Have you had any experiences with dickhead customers?
John: I work daytime, and 80 percent – no, 90 percent – of the time my customers are good.

You don't get the drunk guys?
No, they're always good. Nighttime is where it gets bad. That's why I work during the day. They're all nice apart from this guy [gestures to a guy eating a kebab].

What's wrong with him?
He doesn't like my colleague's new hair cut.

I think it's a great haircut.

[high-fives]

@CharlieBCuff

In the last few years, Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson has demonstrated a marked savvy when it comes to film scores—and he's been lauded accordingly. His composition for 2014's The Theory of Everything garnered him Oscar and Golden Globe nominations (he won the latter), and the following year he received his second Oscar nod thanks to his score for Denis Villenueve's Sicario. And this Sunday he'll find out if he'll walk away with another Golden Globe statuette for his work on Arrival, Villenueve's cerebral, nuanced take on alien sci-fi.

In fact Arrival is the third project on which Jóhannsson and the French-Canadian director have partnered—a relationship that began with the 2013 thriller Prisoners. In all three collaborations, Jóhannsson displays a rare acumen for making music which functions as an essential element to the film's emotional infrastructure. He provides a soul of sorts, a reliable touchstone that becomes indispensable to a film's disposition, and with Arrival, Jóhannsson's excelled once again. At the beginning of the film when we don't yet know what has arrived, his inscrutable sonic portrayal of the mystery matches Villenueve's slow divulgence of facts beat for beat. And when the revelation finally comes, the moment is seared into our minds by a profusion of alien sounds, showcasing a soundscape that's new and exotic and yet still distinctly Jóhannsson. Next up the composer will lend his scoring capabilities to the much anticipated (again) Villeneuve-helmed Blade Runner 2049, out this coming fall.

Born in Reykjavík, Jóhannsson grew up listening to classical music, learning to play both piano and trombone, but he was ultimately disinterested in pursuing a formal, conservatory-bound education. Instead he studied linguistics and pursued music by playing with noisy, minimalist shoegaze groups and developing a zest for the studio. "I was completely fascinated by the studio process and layering sounds and creating soundscapes out of layering massive squalls of sound," he tells me on the phone from Berlin. "Layers of distorted guitar. Fuzz pedals. Filtered and EQ'd with masses of reverb and then stacking and sculpting them.

By eschewing the rigors of academic study, Jóhannsson's taste remained mutable and dynamic, open to creative forces that extend back hundreds of years. Included on his post-1900 list of influences are such varied artists as Karlheinz Stockhausen, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Suicide, and Philip Glass—with traces of bleeding into his own unique voice as composer.

Jóhannsson's distinct style first manifested on Englabörn, a 2002 record based on his music for a theater piece of the same name, which he describes as "a dark, very disturbing play about domestic violence." He continues: "It was dealing with very ugly things—the worst in the nature of man. My reaction to it was to try to write the most beautiful music that I could."

After positive responses from both critics and audiences, Jóhannsson expanded the music into a suite, subtly reconfiguring the score to better serve as a standalone record. Piano, glockenspiel, celeste, organ, percussion, a string quartet, and electronics all figure into the music, which is soft, melancholic, and very beautiful indeed. Englabörn is anchored by Jóhannsson's deft use of space and colored by his variegated musical experiences. "This music was kind of a Eureka! moment for me," he says. "Everything I'd been doing up until then seemed like it had led to that album and to that music."

Read more on Noisey.

Many turned to a bottle of the strong stuff after the chilling announcement that Donald Trump was to become the 45th President of the United States. And as Trump's inauguration approaches in just under two weeks, booze cupboards across the world are likely to be plundered again.

With the impending need for several stiff drinks come January 20 in mind, six female brewers from Denver, Colorado have created an anti-Trump beer.

The beer, aptly named "Makin' Noise: A Pussy Riot Beer," is inspired by the Russian activist punk rock group of the same name. And of course, references can't help but be made with Trump's own infamous misogynistic outburst.

But the Colorado-based brewers involved, who include women from Guardian Brewing Company, Goldspot Brewing Company, Lady Justice Brewing, and Brewability Lab, don't want to give Trump the limelight. The mission statement behind the beer says: "This beer works to combat the hate and oppression while also lending support and solidarity to the fight for equality."

A portion of money raised from sales will also go to LGBTQ groups, Planned Parenthood, and environmental charities, among others.

Read more on MUNCHIES

When the original One Day at a Time premiered in 1975, executive producer Norman Lear made television history by launching a female-driven sitcom about a divorced single mom. The show aired for ten years and lived on in syndication. Queer television writer Michelle Badillo grew up on reruns, watching it in her Forest Hills, Queens apartment with her own divorced mom. Now living in Los Angeles, Badillo, 24, is the youngest writer on the newly revamped One Day at a Time, premiering this weekend on Netflix.

"It freaks my mom out that she loved the show so much as a kid, grew up to live that exact life, and now I'm writing on this show," Badillo says.

Like Badillo, the characters on the new show are Latina. The remake centers around a Cuban mom and her kids living in an apartment in Echo Park, the traditionally Latino Los Angeles neighborhood that has recently been gentrified by coffee shops and vegan restaurants. Legendary EGOT Rita Moreno joins the cast as the grandmother Lydia, a Cuban immigrant who has lived the Latina American dream. This week, we sat down with Badillo to talk Latinos on TV, queer culture in mainstream Hollywood, and that time Mischa Barton played a lesbian on The O.C.

BROADLY: As an Argentinian and Puerto Rican woman, what was the experience of writing a Cuban family like?
Michelle Badillo : The writers' room was a lesson in what we already knew, which is the most specific is the most universal. Half of the writers in the room were Latino, and two were Cuban, but it was easy for all of us to apply our own experiences to this family. Latinos are specific, but we're also not. We just have a context that hasn't been explored much on TV. Nobody thinks of white people as being culturally specific, especially in media, because white people are still considered what's normal, but there's so many Latinos in this country.

Read more: The Changing Story of Abortion on Television

Who were your favorite Latina characters on TV growing up?
The first Latina TV actress I remember is Eva Longoria on Desperate Housewives, when I was in middle school. I don't remember watching any other Latina characters before that, mostly because I don't think there really were any. It's not like Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz were doing TV. There were some ethnically ambiguous actresses who could have been Latina, but you never really knew. Being Latina wasn't actually a part of their characters. With One Day at a Time, it was important that besides casting Latino people, the characters and stories also had to feel Latino. We didn't want this to feel like any other show but with brown faces.

What's your reaction to when people say diversity is "trending"?
As we wrote this show last year, most other Latino shows got cancelled or failed to get picked up after their pilot was made, essentially all of them except Jane the Virgin. All of a sudden, there was supposedly going to be all these Latina shows, but Telenovela got cancelled. Cristela got cancelled. So while more Latino shows might be getting a shot, there are still only a couple on air at a time. It feels false to say Latino shows are trending when there's now just two or three instead of none.

Read more on Broadly.

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

In 2012, Permila Tirkey—a member of India's lowest caste—was awarded about $330,000 at an employment tribunal after being treated like a slave by a higher-caste couple. She had been paid around 15 cents per hour and worked 18-hour days, seven days a week, performing menial household tasks. She was made to sleep on a mattress on the floor and wasn't allowed to contact her family. All of this took place not in Delhi or Mumbai, where India's caste structure ranks sections of society by the social class they were born into, but at a house in Milton Keynes, a town in Buckinghamshire, England.

Tirkey's was the first case of caste discrimination to reach a courtroom in the UK, but according to British charity Anti Caste Discrimination Alliance (ACDA), her situation is representative of a much larger problem. This type of prejudice, they say, is widespread among Indian communities throughout the UK. And although non-Indian communities might not be aware of the existence of caste discrimination in this country, it has been acknowledged by the government, with proposals to amend the Equality Act 2010 to include caste being approved in 2013.

However, the amendment is yet to be implemented, with caste rights groups claiming that upper-caste Hindus have placed pressure on politicians to slow down its progress. It's also been opposed by prominent members of numerous Hindu groups, including the Alliance of Hindu Organisations, Hindu Council UK, Hindu Forum of Britain, and the Council of Hindu Temples, along with MPs for areas with large Hindu and Sikh populations.

But what possible reason could there be to oppose legislation that seeks to prevent people from being discriminated against due to a characteristic they have zero control over—the family they were born into? I got in touch with Anil Bhanot of the Hindu Council UK to find out.

Bhanot believes that caste isn't actually an issue in the UK, and that the attempts to get it included in the act stem from animosity harbored by Dalits, the lowest Hindu caste, toward higher castes, due to the mistreatment of the former by the latter in India. "This vengeful thing will not work," says Bhanot. "It will divide us, and it will destroy our community. There will be the opposite of integration."

Ravi Kumar of the ACDA has a very different take on the situation. He claims that the drive to have caste included in the Equality Act was triggered by endemic caste discrimination in both the British Sikh and British Hindu communities. "Originally, when migrants first came to this country in the 60s and 70s, they all clubbed together in the face of racial discrimination and hostility. Then, when more people were here and people started building temples, caste re-emerged," he says. "During the 80s, this process crystallized caste discrimination. Nowadays, it's happening all over the county."

Kumar believes the opposition to the legislation comes in part from temples wanting to assign important religious positions based on caste: "Some people think, 'We want to pick and choose our priests, and they have to be from a higher caste. By having this legislation, it means that we'll have to open up the options for which priest comes into our temple.'"

Shops in Southall. All photos by Sam Tahmassebi

So is caste discrimination in Britain a non-issue, or are Hindu organizations attempting to sweep it under the rug? I headed for Southall, Wembley Central, and Alperton's "Little India" areas, sections of London with large Hindu and Sikh populations, to speak to people from the communities supposedly affected by the issue. There, I gave out 50 questionnaires to passersby, which asked respondents whether they thought caste discrimination is a problem in the UK; if they had been personally affected by it; if it has ever hindered them when seeking employment; and if they felt it should be included in the Equality Act. Twenty percent of those who filled it in were Sikh, 76 percent were Hindu, and I also surveyed an Indian Muslim and an atheist who was raised in a Hindu household.

Fifty-four percent of the respondents believed that caste discrimination was indeed a problem, with 20 percent claiming to have been personally affected by it. I was also told about quite severe prejudice suffered by certain people, including the story of a Sikh girl from Southall whose family had moved from Birmingham to London to escape the hassle they got there because of her parents' mixed-caste marriage, only to receive similar treatment in the capital.

"My mom's side of the family are very, very Hindu, and my dad's side are very, very Sikh," she said. "My mom was the top caste in Hinduism, and my dad's a skilled trader. There are family members who were incredibly rude and discriminatory to us as children. I've grown up with it and find it disheartening. There are people who don't want to date each other because of these caste issues. It's a bit pathetic, because we don't live in India."

Twenty percent of the respondents indicated that caste discrimination had hindered them when seeking employment. When questioned further, some of them claimed there were occasions when people from specific castes had been requested for a job. Others said they couldn't be sure that they had been affected in this way, and that it was just a suspicion.

Sixty-eight percent of those surveyed believed that caste should be included in the Equality Act. Interestingly, this figure included a good number of people who had answered "no" when asked if it was a problem. When quizzed on why he thought caste should be covered by the law, even though he believed it wasn't an issue, Shyam—a Gujarati Hindu who runs the Viva Village shop and cafe in Alperton, London—told me that it was best to include it just in case other people's experiences were different to his. "I've never come across [caste discrimination] myself, but others might have, so they should have it in there," he said. He was also kind enough to invite me into his shop for a free cup of masala tea, so shouts to Shyam for that.

Shyam and his wife in Viva Village

Other respondents who said they didn't think caste discrimination was a problem but indicated they felt it should be covered by the act told me they'd been subjected to it in other countries and didn't want it creeping in over here. "I've seen it outside of the UK and heard many cases of it happening there, so it should be included," said a young Hindu from Alperton.

A variety of reasons were given by those who opposed the inclusion of caste in the act, ranging from the belief that cultural rather than legislative changes are needed to eradicate this form of prejudice, to there being no need for the law to be revised because caste discrimination supposedly doesn't exist in the UK. No one seemed to share Bhanot's view that the amendment would damage community cohesion. I didn't question all of the respondents about their answers, though, so it's possible some of the people surveyed might have shared this view.

From the people I spoke to and surveyed, it would seem that caste discrimination is a pressing issue for British Sikhs and Hindus. Admittedly, a sample size of 50 in specific areas of London isn't exactly representative of the entire country. However, what I can say for certain is that some people are and have been discriminated against on account of their caste, meaning—surely—the government should do whatever it can on a legislative level, even if true change relies on community action. Of course, the inclusion of caste in a revised Equality Act has already been approved, so why is it taking so long to implement?

Kumar believes it's due to opposition from powerful Hindu and Sikh organizations.

"Imagine if the Race Equality Act had been determined by Parliament, then the government started listening to people saying, 'We don't believe racial discrimination exists,'" he says. "It's ridiculous. Something really needs to be done. We don't tolerate racial discrimination, and we don't tolerate sexual discrimination or discrimination based on sexual preference, so we can't tolerate this either."

The government stated in September of 2016 that it would conduct a consultation by 2017 to decide "whether additional measures are needed to ensure victims of caste discrimination have ­appropriate legal protection and effective remedies." The results of the consultation are yet to be announced, which isn't a great sign.

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If you want to get into an existential debate about the true nature of reality, Zardulu is full of perfect counterpoints. No matter what kind of clear, indisputable fact you think you're putting down, the masked artist will gladly find a way to question and twist it.

Zardulu first shook up the world of viral videos when she was suspected of (and later claimed responsibility for) staging the iconic Pizza Rat clip that set the internet on fire last year. Since then she says she's been working on many more surreal and absurd "illusions"—her word for successful media hoaxes. She's taken credit for clips of a raccoon riding a crocodile in Florida, three-eyed catfish in the Gowanus Canal, and another rat that took a selfie on a New York subway platform.

This week it was a squirrel that made headlines for taking a Crunchie bar from a convenience store shelf before darting under a car with the chocolate in its teeth. The story was widely picked up (complete with recycled "nuts" puns) by most major media orgs—and for the record has not been proven a hoax. (We did our own breakdown of the squirrel's inherent relatability). Regardless, the entire news cycle basically proved one of Zardulu's central points: that we need rodents to explain our lives to us, and bring a sense of wonder into our boring existence.

Though she wouldn't say whether she was involved with the squirrel thief in Toronto, she told VICE the video "would be very easy to fabricate." In her experience working on over 80 illusions, several of which involved animals, she says it wouldn't be too hard to practice and create the scene.

"Having worked with many rodents, training is almost always accomplished by withholding food until a desired behavior is performed," she told VICE. "If the desired behaviour is to get the food, like a candy bar, then the training becomes even easier."

Zardulu says rodents have often been part of her viral successes. "I've used domesticated Norwegian and Black rats in many videos," she said. "Simply putting them in public with a piece of atypical rat food, people video them and they go viral almost every time."

This visual bait, according to the artist's claimed oeuvre, is often left for unsuspecting passersby to film and get excited about. That those observers sometimes believe the illusion to be authentic can help launch the clip to super-meme status.

Of course, Zardulu's claims of orchestrating viral hoaxes have been challenged as yet more trickery. But if you ask Zardulu, exactly what parts of a video are authentic, and what aspects may or may not be staged (including her authorship), doesn't really matter in the end. She's an advocate for myths over facts—an admittedly frustrating premise for a journalistic interview. Her motive isn't so much to deceive as it is to give a platform for us to laugh at ourselves and get outside boring rationality.

Strangely, Zardulu does not intend to comment on the quality and health of our media apparatus. While the world wrings its hands over the rise of "fake news" influencing elections, she welcomes the blurring of real and fake in the search for deeper truth.

Though she says each stunt should be judged on its intentions and repercussions, she doesn't blame journalists for wanting to jump on board, particularly when she's put so much work into backstory and details. "There is no set of standards for determining the validity of a story that can't be overcome by a little pre-production and a couple good actors," she said.

Zardulu says we, the media but also humanity, can't help getting swept up in an exciting animal drama (just like us, but cuter!) and even suggests that may not be such a terrible thing.

You might wonder why rodents, as opposed to more classically cute and meme-worthy animals, are at the centre of these viral videos. According to Zardulu, the small, skittish creatures seem to be a perfect foil on which to project our own human frailties.

"I don't believe that people are drawn to rodent videos simply because they are anomalies. That would be like interpreting a myth in a literal sense," she told VICE. "I interpret it more figuratively, that the rodent is giving form to some unconscious process."

It's a place to direct our cynicism, our snark, and also our ever-narrowing imaginations. "Rodents flow in dark and mysterious currents beneath the city streets, as our thoughts beneath the presence of ordinary experience."

This is how Zardulu justifies what she calls "harmless" hoaxes—because she sees a crisis of imagination. "With the Age of Enlightenment, realism became the authority," she told VICE. "It's eroded imagination ever since." So many artists scramble to attach their work to something autobiographical or factually true, yet sometimes art and abstraction are better and explaining.

"Many of the greatest human achievements came during Ancient Greece, when philosophy and mythology, rational and irrational, all blended together."

In this sense, a staged rodent stunt can stand as a perfect blend of real and unreal, rational and absurd. On its face the squirrel is in fact stealing a chocolate bar from a shelf. It does run away with surprising speed and intention. That the store owners have a backstory involving over 40 stolen chocolate bars seems especially outside the limits of reason, but who am I to judge.

Zardulu isn't deterred by the rise of Infowars or other conspiracy movements—the kind that point at just about anything and call it fake. She's not being cynical when she says it's time to embrace what I'll call post-truth. 

"We're all standing at the shore of reality with the waves of the transcendency lapping at our feet," she told VICE. "The ground is no longer reliable and there's nowhere to run. I say, let it wash us all away."

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In what sounds like a concept for a bad Banksy painting, the Department of Defense has recently put out a call for proposals for manufacturing biodegradable bullets that also contain seeds.

Released on November 30 through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) agency—essentially a federal venture capital firm—the call for proposals is specifically looking for a bullet design that can be used on US military training facilities. According to the report, the US Army currently manufactures and consumes "hundreds of thousands" of rounds of ammunition at its proving grounds around the world, which range from small caliber bullets to "40 mm grenades, 60mm, 81mm, and 120mm mortars...20mm tank rounds; and 155mm artillery rounds."

Generally, these rounds are left on the ground after use given the lack of any efficient way of recovering them, despite the fact that they can take "hundreds of years or more" to degrade, posing a substantial environmental risk insofar as the casing could pollute water supplies or be discovered by animals. According to the Department of Defense call for proposals, these spent shells are also liable to be found by locals around the training facilities, who may be unable to differentiate the training rounds from tactical rounds.

Read more on Motherboard.

Check out more from Julian Glander at his Twitter, Instagram, and blog.